Spam Kings

Chapter 7. 

Shiksaa Meets Scott Richter

Shiksaa was a big believer in spammus interruptus. When new junk emailers appeared on her radar screen—by sending her spam or getting mentioned in anti-spam newsgroups—she made a point of paying them a preemptive online visit. If the spammer had an America Online account, she would add the screen name to her buddy list and wait to be notified that he or she was online. Then Shiksaa would gently let the newbie know that anti-spammers like her would be hounding them every step of the way. She wanted to divest them of any illusions that junk emailing was an easy way to make a buck. Better to nip a chickenboner in the bud than to try to reform a full-blown, Rokso-grade spam operation.

But it didn’t work out quite that way with Scott Richter, president of Colorado-based SaveRealBig, Inc. In July 2001, months before Richter gained the attention of other anti-spammers for his post-9/11 U.S.A. flag ads, Shiksaa added his AOL screen name to her buddy list. When Richter signed on one Saturday evening, she was all over him.

“Hey Scott. I hear you’re spamming. Why?”^[1]

Richter responded that she must have confused him with Chris Smith, a Minnesota spammer who used the nickname Rizler. But Shiksaa refused to back down.

“Help me out here Scott. One of my friends said you spammed him. I was simply asking if that was true.”

“Not that I know of,” said Richter.

To help jog his memory, Shiksaa sent Richter the Internet address of several newsgroup postings where copies ...